Let’s face it: The Big Wedding was more fun when it was fat and Greek — or loud and French, in the case of this adaptation of Gallic laffer Mon frere se marie. Writer-director Justin Zackham awkwardly blends feel-good pablum and raunchy sex jokes with the expected nuptial ingredients: something old (just look at that cast), something new (the groom is an adopted Colombian with three moms to manage), something borrowed (Nancy Meyers called, she wants her ideas back) and something blue (handjobs at the rehearsal dinner, etc.). It’s all catnip for the easily pleased, suggesting possible sleeper success amid louder early-summer studio fare.

Skewing older than other recent R-rated wedding comedies such as Bridesmaids and Bachelorette, The Big Wedding all but ignores the happy couple in favor of the “bigger” sixtysomething names in its starry ensemble: Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton and Susan Sarandon. As in Jean-Stephane Bron’s 2007 original, the grownups’ childish antics threaten to upset the whole event.

Misleading title aside, young Missy and Alejandro’s union is a relatively small affair, held in the groom’s backyard and consisting of only about 100 guests. The vanilla bride (Amanda Seyfried, who’s been down this road before in Mamma Mia!) and her swarthy husband-to-be (British actor Ben Barnes, Prince Caspian in the Chronicles of Narnia series) have known each other since childhood. What makes their engagement interesting is the fact that Alejandro was born in Colombia and raised by an upscale Connecticut couple with two kids of their own.

Naturally, Alejandro wants his birth mother, Madonna (Patricia Rae), to attend, but he doesn’t have the nerve to tell the conservative Catholic woman that his adoptive parents, Don and Ellie Griffin (De Niro and Keaton, a million miles from The Godfather: Part II), have been divorced for the past decade. Instead, he begs Don to stash his new g.f., Bebe (Sarandon), and pretend that everything’s still rock-solid between him and Ellie — the sort of arrangement that must seem all too familiar to The Birdcage star Robin Williams (unusually restrained as the ceremony’s Irish priest).

Surely The Big Wedding’s paucity of genuinely inspired moments is due less to Williams’ involvement than its other officiant, Zackham, who has captured the bright, hyper-sunny look of Nora Ephron and David Frankel movies (simply by using d.p. Jonathan Brown) without grasping those helmers’ gift for comedy. The film isn’t so much funny as it is merely amusing — a laundry list of inappropriate and potentially embarrassing moments that strive mightily, but never quite manage to land the laugh.

The awkward situations begin with Ellie’s arrival at her former home. Letting herself in, she accidentally walks in on Don going down on Bebe (who was once Ellie’s best friend and, evidently, still manages to excite the man she stole 10 years earlier). After the three grownups agree to Alejandro’s charade, Ellie turns the tables, enjoying a 40-minute morning-sex session loud enough to convince not only Madonna but everyone else within a two-mile radius that she and Don are still compatible.

Meanwhile, the Griffins’ two biological children show up with plenty of their own issues. Lyla (a high-strung Katherine Heigl) has just broken up with her long-time b.f., has unexplained barfing spells and faints at the sight of a maternity ward. You don’t have to be an obstetrician to recognize the symptoms, though her slow-on-the-uptake brother Jared (Topher Grace) inexplicably diagnoses her as having a mild concussion. Unlike the rest of his hot-blooded family, Jared has sworn to wait for sex until marriage, but at 29, he’s having second thoughts — and the first available female to cross his path is sister-by-adoption Nuria (Ana Ayora), who stayed behind in Colombia when Alejandro moved to the States.

In the French version of such a scenario, one wouldn’t be surprised by the ensuing sexual antics, but all that rumpy-pumpy seems rather inappropriate in the remake’s upper-crust East Coast milieu. Presenting De Niro’s character as a recovering-alcoholic sculptor only goes so far to explain his licentious nature: He turns up drunk in one scene, reveals all the family secrets, and then sobers up immediately. Otherwise, he’s the pic’s go-to guy for delivering too-eloquent speeches, which occur with regularity whenever the script requires a heart-tugging moment. Such emotional ploys come more naturally to Zackham (who hit it big with The Bucket List script) than comedy does, offering a much-needed dose of charm to the otherwise formulaic festivities.

Amanda Seyfried had fun on the set of Les Misérables. In a photo feature shoot with Vanity Fair.com, the actress, who plays adopted daughter Cosette to Hugh Jackman's Valjean, talks about how she and her co-star invented "alternative story lines that transformed their characters' tender relationship into something altogether less innocent," according to the website. more »

Do you hear the people sing? Actually, they're not just people, they're ac-tors! I'm talking Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried and Eddie Redmayne, the cast of Oscar winner Tom Hooper's poverty-never-looked-so-expensive film adaptation of Les Miserables. Each can be heard performing in this extended clip about Hooper's novel approach to making of the movie musical that's based on Victor Hugo's classic novel about French politics and revolution. Russell Crowe, who plays Inspector Javert and once sang for the much-mocked band 30 Odd Foot of Grunts, is also in the clip, although he doesn't show off his pipes. more »

What if The Sting's Henry Gondorff and Johnny Hooker could be your surrogate parents? And what if they were also SoCal slackers? That seems to be the thought at the center of Brian Crano's directorial debut, an uneven but appealing dramedy about two car thieves and petty con-artists who end up taking charge of an abandoned 12-year-old boy. It's a film that should be appallingly twee, but more often than not is actually scruffy and sweet, thanks to a nicely underplayed turn by Chandler Canterbury as the kid, Kelsey, and the chemistry between Jason Ritter and Jake Sandvig (who co-wrote the film with Crano) as hipster grifters Ben and Alan.more »

In the vigilante fantasy Gone, Amanda Seyfried plays Jill, a young Portland woman who can’t shake the memory of her abduction a year ago. She managed to slip through the guy’s clutches – he’d been holding her at the bottom of a deep pit in a sprawling local park – but the local cops, after finding no evidence of said hole (it’s a very big park), decided she made the whole thing up. Then one night Jill’s sister (Emily Wickersham) goes missing in a similar fashion: When Jill goes to the cops for help, they eye her warily, all except newbie detective Wes Bentley, who purrs at her creepily, in a red-herring sort of way.more »

If you were put off by the thought of Demi Moore playing feminist icon Gloria Steinem in the currently-filming porn biopic Lovelace, you have the whip-its to thank for this casting change: Sarah Jessica Parker will now step into Steinem's shoes opposite Amanda Seyfried's titular Linda Lovelace as Moore recovers and, as a press release delicately puts it, "seek[s] treatment for exhaustion." Just a few more day-playing A-listers and Lovelace will officially turn into New Year's Eve. [Deadline]

I can kind of see a resemblance between Demi Moore and feminist activist/journalist Gloria Steinem, whom the former Mrs. Kutcher has been tapped to play in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's Lovelace. But at this point the porn biopic -- the one starring Amanda Seyfried as Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace, to feature a cameo by James Franco as Hugh Hefner -- feels like it's turning into a bizarrely distracting hit parade-sideshow of stars/names playing real life Lovelace acquaintances. (Further evidence, just announced over the wires: Eric Roberts as... lie detector test administrator Nat Laurendi! For reals.)more »

Here's one way to deflect attention from NYU GradeGate: Variety reports that James Franco is in talks to play Playboy impresario Hugh Hefner in Lovelace, the porn biopic starring Amanda Seyfried as the titular XXX actress Linda Lovelace, of Deep Throat fame. Unfortunately -- or fortunately? -- Franco's role would be limited to a one-day cameo, which sounds like something along the lines of his blink-and-you'll-miss-it Green Hornet appearance. The film is currently shooting in Los Angeles. [Variety]

"I'll sleep when he's dead!" Amanda Seyfried declares in the new trailer for Gone, referencing the serial killer who has kidnapped her onscreen sis. You see, Seyfried's character Jill is frustrated because no one in her small town believes that the serial killer who kidnapped her two years ago has now kidnapped her sister. That's because they didn't believe Jill's story to begin with (and they're probably bored with Jill's cliched dialogue). So now it's just Jill vs. a ticking clock vs. an unsupportive police squad who tries to convince Jill that this serial killer drama is all in her head.

Between Puss in Boots, In Time, and Rum Diary, I didn't see much reason to fork over $13 at the movies this weekend. (Though I did see Like Crazy -- or as I like to call it, Jennifer Lawrence Thanklessly Pouts in a Supporting Role.) Instead of paying up, let's read up on Twitter's feelings about these three new films. Prepare to have mixed feelings about Justin Timberlake by the time we hit #1.

Now that I'm finally over The Blind Side's undeserved Oscar presence, I can get back to celebrating the things I love about Sandra Bullock. She is feisty! And sincere! And funny! In 1991, she'd apparently already nailed down that Bullockian trifecta, because she is positively charming in this audition tape from the beginning of her career. Check it out after the jump, along with the rest of Buzz Break (including Lindsay Lohan's newest $1 million offer).

After departing the phenomenally successful Twilight franchise that launched star Kristen Stewart into the stratosphere along with then-unknowns Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner, director Catherine Hardwicke set her sights on another supernatural teen romance: Red Riding Hood. Starring Amanda Seyfried as the titular heroine, Hardwicke's take on the age-old fairytale becomes a medieval murder-mystery with a current of seething sensuality bubbling beneath the surface -- just one of many subjects the director discussed in a frank conversation with Movieline about Red Riding Hood, post-Twilight pressure, her critics, and more.

Fairytales are meant to teach lessons -- and the older you get, the more twisted those lessons become. Catherine Hardwicke's Red Riding Hood -- featuring a virginal Amanda Seyfried in that iconic red cloak, enveloped in the crimson of sensuality and blood lust, a young woman inexplicably drawn to the big, bad wolf -- isn't the first film to take the fairytale's latent messaging to darker, and we mean really dark, places.